Monday, January 1, 2018

In a year where some might say that the sacred has become profane, but everyone would clearly agree that 'we live in interesting times, I hope that the next year is less of a roller coaster ride (yea, right...). Lotsa stuff to talk about at dinner parties...and lotsa reasons to break the bread with folks that might not have the same feelings about things that you do...

I've used a pressure cooker for the past 30 years. It all started when I had to carry my fuel up to Dhee Sar, the uninhabited very high alpine meadow where I studied marmots for my dissertation research in Pakistan in the late '80s and early '90s. However, learning to cook non-professional Pakistani cuisine (think the unit of measurement for spice is cups rather than tablespoons!) was always delicious but often resulted in rice burned in the bottom of the pot (OK, I never read a recipe so cut me some slack...). Thus, it is with GREAT pleasure that I can announce that I've just gotten an electric pressure cooker (I'm not getting paid for this, but it's an Instant Pot). Pretty cool.

Electric pressure cookers are incredibly efficient...they not only save oven/stove time, but they also save water--realize that you only have one pot to clean! I'm experimenting with a variety of recipes now. The first thing I made was modified from a quiche recipe (I played around with this great veggie quiche recipe). Delicious! In less than an hour and without having to fire up the oven or add fat to the kitchen top,I pressure steamed a delicious family brunch.

There are tonnes of bean recipes to explore and I'm really excited to play around with some 5-minute rice and fish recipes -- I'm going to use tilapia (some of them start with frozen fish--go figure!--no excuse to not cook a fresh meal anymore...).

The great thing about the electric pressure cooker is that it's all science because it regulates the temperature and pressure in ways you can't as easily do with a pressure cooker on a stove or, as I cut my teeth on, on a kerosene burner or a yak-dung fire.

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Daniel T. Blumstein is a Professor and in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Los Angeles, and is a Professor in the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. In addition to over 300 scholarly publications, he has written or edited six previous books. Learn more about Dan's interests and research at his UCLA website.

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